Table Of ContentMind and Life, Form and Content
��
M��� H������
P�������� �� H����������� B����
Copyright © Mike Hockney 2014
The right of Mike Hockney to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright
Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case
of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or
in a review.
Quotations
“Life is a predicament that precedes death.” – Henry James
“The meaning of life is that it stops.” – Kafka
“Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into
it.” – Tom Lehrer
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” – John
Lennon
“Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.” – Alan Bennett
“To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life.” – Eric Hoffer
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” –
Kierkegaard
“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience.
And then there is California.” – Edward Abbey
“Reduced to general theories, mathematics would be a beautiful form
without content.” – Henri Lebesgue
“It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the
real one, must have something – a form – in common with it.” –
Wittgenstein
“Design is the method of putting form and content together.” – Paul Rand
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” –
Einstein
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of
logic, but creatures of emotion.” – Dale Carnegie
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the
limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.” –Ambrose
Bierce
“In life, particularly in public life, psychology is more powerful than logic.”
– Ludwig Quidde
“The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the
exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is
more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information
that can’t be easily defined in zeros and ones.” – Naveen Jain
“Logic will never change emotion or perception.” – Edward de Bono
“Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than
mistakes of logic.” – Edward de Bono
“In the end, it’s not going to matter how many breaths you took, but how
many moments took your breath away” – Shing Xiong
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” – Buddha
Table of Contents
Mind and Life, Form and Content
Quotations
Table of Contents
Introduction
What Is It?
The Cosmic Operating System
The Cosmic Chessboard
Involution
The Refutation
The Psychopath War
Gorillas and Shakespeare
The Cosmic Novel
Life
The Formula
God?
Platonic Form
The Argument from the Form of Life
The Theory of Forms
The Socratic/Platonic Form of Equality
The Shadow
The Cosmic Hallucination
True Knowledge
The Voice of Reason?
The Madness
Episodic Reality
The Challenge
Impersonators
Star Trek
Genotype and Phenotype
Transubstantiation
Prime Matter
Hylomorphism
The Inevitable Failure of Science
Teleology
Radial and Tangential Energy
Hyperphysics
The Sacred Army
The Energy Vampires
The Soul: Plato versus Aristotle
Hell
Illusion
The Ontological Argument
Panpneumatism
The Soul Series
Death
The Empire of the Decaying Map
Celestial Prime Matter versus Terrestrial Prime Matter
Eternity
Mythos and Logos
The Unholy City
Fear
X-Men
The Pretenders
We Faustians
The Game of Life
The Ultimate Detectives
Conclusion
Introduction
What is form? What is content? You cannot understand what life and mind
are unless you can answer these two fundamental questions of ontology.
Compared with science’s empiricist way of thinking about reality, form and
content furnish a radically different, rationalist alternative that puts mind
and life – rather than mindless, lifeless matter – at the heart of existence.
Anyone who is dissatisfied with how science addresses the questions of
ultimate reality has an entirely new, logical approach available to them via
form and content. Where the engine of science is abstract, “physical”
mathematics, the engine of form and content is real, ontological
mathematics.
In the ancient world, matter was regarded as the content for form. Form
provided the structure of a thing, while matter was the thing’s content that
received the structure. Form constituted the essence of the thing, and,
without it, the thing dissolved into amorphous, unstructured potentiality
rather than actuality. Form supplied an intelligible container, while matter
was the sensible content inside the container.
Plato and Aristotle considered matter as shapeless, lifeless and
purposeless, while form was what shaped matter and gave it its nature,
purpose and even life. Without form, there could be no life at all since
matter did not possess the quality of life. This fundamentally contradicts the
modern scientific view, which claims that mind and life are produced by
particular ways of organising mindless, lifeless atoms – a logical
impossibility since mind cannot come from non-mind, or life from non-life.
The reason why scientists say that lifeless matter creates life is very simple:
they have denied the existence of anything other than matter, hence matter
must be the source of life. Of course, no scientist has ever explained how
life comes from atoms, just as no scientist has ever explained how atoms
generate mind. No scientist has proposed any model, hypothesis or
definition with which to even get started.
There is nothing whatsoever in the theory of DNA that explains how
arranging atoms in this way causes life and mind. Moreover, the emergence
of DNA is itself not said to be caused but merely to arise by random
accident. If, by some miracle, you could demonstrate how DNA necessarily
generates life, mind and consciousness, you would still be committed to a
stance that life, mind and consciousness ultimately arise by chance in an
inherently mindless, lifeless, purposeless, meaningless universe ruled by
throws of the dice. This is indeed the atheistic, nihilistic stance of modern
science. We randomly come from dust (stardust), it says, and we will return
to dust in due course.
If form defines matter, yet is radically different from matter, then this
implies an immaterial reality that scientific materialism is unable to detect,
in which case all of the claims of science regarding ultimate reality must
fail.
The world is not exclusively made of matter, contrary to the claims of
scientific materialism. Form, not matter, makes the world what it is. Matter
is merely a kind of clay that form acts on to create all of the order, pattern,
structure, organisation and life that constitutes meaningful existence and an
intelligible cosmos.
What conveys form? What conveys content? What conveys matter?
Where are matterless form and formless content/ matter located? How do
they come together and interact? What are the laws governing them? Are
form and content/ matter two separate “realities”, or two sides of one coin?
Do they constitute a dualism or a dual-aspect monism?
Anyone who cannot define form and content/ matter will never
understand reality. Science and religion manifestly fail to do so. Philosophy
has tried but failed to reach any definitive conclusions. Only one subject
can offer certainty in this regard – ontological mathematics.
Mathematically, form and content allow a precise, non-sensory reality to
be described and defined, something that’s impossible with science. Above
all, form and content naturally lend themselves to addressing the question
of mind, an issue with which science has never made any progress, and
never can since mind is scientifically unobservable, hence can form no part
of the scientific method, based on observation and measurement.
Form and content are the means to rationally venture into the unseen,
noumenal world that underlies our “common sense” world of appearances,
into the world not of physics but of metaphysics (that which comes after
physics or lies beyond physics).
The soul belongs to the immaterial, metaphysical domain outside space
and time, not to the material, physical domain of space and time that
science probes. Science can say nothing at all about the soul, and its usual
stance is simply to ridicule it and deny that it exists. Metaphysics –
comprising the strictly mathematical exploration of form and content – goes
where science cannot, and reveals that this visible world of ours is merely
the content of an invisible world of form. This other world is a
mathematical Singularity and is none other than Soul World! The visible
world is a holographic projection of Soul World.
Form and content belong to a mathematical rather than scientific
conception of reality, and provide the rational, logical means to defend
religious, spiritual and New Age conceptions of reality.
This is the incredible story of form and content and how reality is
shaped by them, and, most especially, life, mind and existence itself.
What Is It?
What is existence made of? This is the most fundamental question of all.
With this answer, we can then respond to Leibniz’s famous question: Why is
there something rather than nothing? In fact, the two questions are
fundamentally connected.
Given that “nothing” is the rational ground state of the universe, and the
most stable state of the universe conceivably possible (since “nothing”
cannot degenerate into a lower state because it’s already at the lowest state),
an overwhelming prima facie case can be advanced that there ought to be
nothing rather than something, so why isn’t there?
The principle of sufficient reason makes it mandatory for existence to
have a net effect of “nothing”, since there is no sufficient reason why it
should have any arbitrary non-zero value. So, whatever “something” is, it
must have one quality of which we are rationally certain: averaged across
all of its states, it must result in a net value of exactly zero.
With this fact in mind, the question of what existence is made of
becomes radically simple: it’s made of whatever can be something while
also, overall, being zero. Not close to zero or approximately zero but
perfectly zero. Only one subject is capable of defining and providing such a
scenario: mathematics.
Existence is made of mathematics. In particular, it’s made of
mathematics that precisely balances to zero. This is ontological
mathematics. Ontological mathematics is the mathematics of perfect cosmic
symmetry, with “something” being perfectly symmetrical with respect to
zero (“nothing”), i.e. something has a positive component matched by an
